


the butcher shop with the sawdust strewn

by heliantheae



Series: i think it's called my destiny that i am changing [1]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ba Sing Se, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-14
Updated: 2021-01-14
Packaged: 2021-03-18 14:35:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28744827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heliantheae/pseuds/heliantheae
Summary: After his fight with Jet in the tea shop, Zuko becomes a guard in Ba Sing Se.
Series: i think it's called my destiny that i am changing [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2108493
Comments: 12
Kudos: 117





	the butcher shop with the sawdust strewn

**Author's Note:**

> is this related to my current wips? no. is there a plot? also no. title from marlene on the wall by suzanne vega. hope everyone is well!

The training the city guards of Ba Sing Se receive spans twelve weeks. Zuko blows through it in three. It only takes him that long because his idea of nonlethal force was honed in the Fire Palace at his father’s knee—or under his father’s boot. 

Ba Sing Se has piles and piles of laws, all of which Zuko memorizes. His training master just stares at him for a moment when he recites an exact statute about what, exactly, constitutes drunken and disorderly behavior. 

He can read. He can hit people with a stick. He excels at slinking through the shadows and finding trouble even in places where trouble shouldn’t be. He is a prodigy. That’s a new experience for him. He is a nightmare for the people responsible for him. That’s familiar. Currently, he’s waiting patiently for a healer to finish examining him. 

“You’re sure he can’t hear out of that ear?” the training master asks doubtfully. “And his eyesight is really that bad?”

The healer doesn’t quite manage to keep from rolling her eyes. “He’s not army material,” she says, repeating the words of the healer who examined all suitably-aged young men entering the city. 

“I can hear,” Zuko repeats, another tired refrain. “There’s ringing sometimes. And I see just fine.”

The healer moves her hand out of his limited periphery. “How many fingers?” she asks. 

Zuko remains stubbornly silent. He doesn’t know, and he doesn’t want to make a fool of himself by guessing incorrectly. 

“Not army material,” the training master sighs, resigned. “That’s a shame. We could use someone like him on the Wall.”

For once, Zuko is grateful for his scar. It feels terrible to be deemed lesser, unworthy, unable. Every fiber of his being that has spent so long striving to be the best, better than Azula, good enough for his father, rejects the healer’s findings. He can do anything anyone else can do, backward and with his eyes shut. 

He does not want to fight his countrymen. He wouldn’t have a choice if he were posted to the Wall. The Fire Nation’s ceaseless attempts to breach the Outer Wall aren’t a siege, not like Uncle had held for six hundred long days, but they keep the Earth Army busy. 

Violence sings in Zuko’s blood, a little like lightning and a little like whiskey. Uncle could serve tea and smile at customers in Pao’s dingy Lower Ring shop. Zuko had tried, and he’d gotten into a sword fight for his troubles. Now here he was, with a healer prodding at the scar tissue marring his face. He wasn’t fit for military duty, but he could undoubtedly serve as a city guard member. 

Uncle didn’t necessarily approve. Too dangerous, he said. As if the rest of Zuko’s life was safe. At least if someone was trying to kill him on the street, he would be paid for his trouble, and really. If no one had slipped a knife between his ribs in the Fire Palace, no one would manage it here.

Serving as a guard member would also ease the suspicion a young sword fighter was subjected to. He really shouldn’t have lost his temper with Jet.

Things weren’t so bad. The baton he’d been given made a satisfying noise when it met flesh, and the bruise if left was bone-deep. Zuko liked that.

He didn’t like the way his training master was looking at him. The man was older, graying, and down a leg from his own time on the Wall. He was also frowning fiercely beneath his bushy eyebrows. 

“What?” Zuko asks despite himself.

“That’s the question, isn’t it? What am I going to do with you?”

“Give me a job,” says Zuko, who is quite sick of rice and twice-used tea. Guards, even the probationary ones, made enough money to keep Uncle in dumplings, if not tea. 

“Yes, I suppose I ought to,” the training master says heavily. “He’ll be fine as a guard?”

That question is directed to the healer, who nods. “Just fine, sir.”

“You’ll meet your partner when he gets in for the evening shift, then,” says the training master. “No, don’t look so hopeful. Jianjun usually works alone. He’s not going to like being stuck with a kid.”

“I’m not hopeful,” Zuko mutters. “I’m hungry.”

The training master ignores him. “Have a nap, if you’d like. You’ve got maybe half a bell before he’s here, and you’ll need your strength for tonight.”

Zuko has done more on less sleep, but he obeys. It’s easy to close his eyes in the break room of the Lower Ring’s East quadrant guard station, easier still to let his breathing even out as darkness crashes over his head.

He wakes when someone kicks the chair he had settled in, and there’s a knife in his hand before his eyes are even open. 

The man who had woken him grunts wordlessly. He’s tall and pale the way everyone who spends their evenings wandering a dark city is pale. His complexion is only broken by flecked scars, remnants from being too near a Fire Nation explosive. 

“Lee?” the man asks, and Zuko nods. “I’m Jianjun. Follow me.”

Zuko does, silent on his feet. 

“Yaochuan says you’re some sort of prodigy,” Jianjun muses.

It takes a moment for Zuko to place the name, but it comes to him. Yaochuan is the training master. To new recruits, he is Sir, Yes Sir, or No Sir. Zuko does not respond to Jianjun’s speculation about his abilities.

“Yaochuan wants me to babysit you. He seems to think you have promise.”

What Zuko really has is the advantages that come with being raised wealthy, if not loved. He can read, write, and hold a blade. He has manners and meticulously cleans the dirt from beneath his fingernails every evening. To the untrained eye, that looks like promise.

“You’re not any better than the rest of us,” says Jianjun. 

“I never said I was.”

“I didn’t ask, boy.” 

Zuko pinches his rising temper like a candle wick. He remains silent.

Jianjun grunts again, this time thoughtful. “Come on. We’ve got about a mile to cover before the Night Market starts.”

Zuko trails after him, alert for signs of trouble on the darkening streets. There are none. Dusk is a transitional point, too late for children to play in the streets and too early for the nightlife to have slunk out of hiding. They pass two Dai Li agents on the roof, but Jianjun ignores them, so Zuko does too.

They make their way down alleys, between tenements, over stinking gutters are around containers full of trash. Jianjun startles a pygmy-puma away from its meal.

Women pass them, huddled in groups. Returning from shifts at the factory or Middle Ring job sites. They eye Zuko and Jianjun warily, drawing closer together. The city guards aren’t Dai Li, but they’re not to be trusted either.

If their distrust bothers Jianjun, it doesn’t show on the man’s face. 

“Do you have coin?” the man asks, ignoring two dusty women as they cross the street to avoid them.

Zuko has been in the city long enough not to answer that question.

“For the Night Market,” Jianjun clarifies. “There’s food, and we’re allowed a break.”

“There’s food at home,” Zuko says.

“Is there?”

Zuko cuts his eyes to the older man.

“No one joins the guard because they want to. You need the money, and the army wouldn’t take you,” he pauses, studying Zuko’s scarred face. “Or the army already had you.”

Zuko shakes his head. “I wasn’t a soldier. Just had an attitude a firebender didn’t like.”

It’s the truth, even, which is the worst part. Jianjun shrugs, moving past the comment. “You’re not so bad, at least for someone so new.” 

“Thanks,” says Zuko. 

They walk in silence until the bells chime seven times and the sun has set fully behind the Wall. It’s still up—Zuko can feel it—but it’s no longer shining on the city of Ba Sing Se. Jianjun steers them to the square in which the Night Market is held. It’s a weekly occurrence and feels a bit like a festival, except the only thing being celebrated is street food and buskers. 

Zuko catches a pickpocket’s eye and raises his lone eyebrow. The boy withdraws his hand from the purse of the woman he had been targeting, shows Zuko his palms to prove that they’re empty, and flees.

“Not bad,” says Jianjun, faintly approving. “Want a kebab?” 

Zuko does, and Jianjun gets him two.

“Do not get used to me feeding you,” the man says firmly and then buys him a bun stuffed with sweet red bean paste. 

He kindly doesn’t comment when Zuko wraps it gently in a napkin and tucks it into his pocket to share with Uncle later. 

He’s lucky, Zuko thinks to himself. The training master had made Jianjun seem intimidating. As far as he could tell, the older man was just anxious. That was understandable. There might not be a war in Ba Sing Se, but there certainly was one on the Wall. If Jianjun shied from lanterns and twitched at sudden noises, well. Zuko was in no condition to judge. 

Having his first proper shift occur at the Night Market was fortunate too. For the most part, people behaved themselves. They knew how easily the Dai Li could make them disappear if they didn’t. Zuko frightened another two pickpockets and would have gotten a third, but Jianjun laid a hand on his arm. “The man she’s about to rob is from the Upper Ring,” he murmurs. 

Zuko considers this. “A noble?” 

“Or a wealthy merchant. Here to slum it where he thinks there won’t be consequences, I’d bet.”

The man is leering unpleasantly at a girl selling flowers, which makes him think Jianjun has a point. Zuko catches the eye of the pickpocket and very pointedly looks the other way. 

It takes the man ten minutes to notice his coin purse is gone, and when he comes to Jianjun to complain, the older man merely blinks calmly at him. “Did you see anyone take it?”

“Well, no,” sputters the man.

“Could you have dropped it?”

“I guess, but—“

“We’ll keep our eyes open, mister,” Jianjun says mildly and strolls away before the man can offer his contact information should the coin purse be found. 

Zuko eyes his new partner consideringly. Part of him feels as if he should be upset on the wealthy man’s behalf—he had been wealthy once, and it wasn’t pleasant to consider what servants and guards might have thought of him—but the rest of him remembers being hungry and the humiliation of watching Uncle dance for a few spare coppers. 

“Going to report me?” Jianjun wants to know.

“For what?” Zuko asks innocently, making a decision. “According to section seven point three of the Ba Sing Se City Guard code, we’re only responsible for the denizens of the ring and quadrant to which we’re assigned.”

“When Yaochuan said you had the rule book memorized, I didn’t believe him,” says Jianjun. “Tell me, is there anything in there about having another kebab?” 

“No,” says Zuko. “I don’t believe there is.” 

“I think I’ll keep you, boy. I think I’ll keep you.”


End file.
